The Next Day

Now that you've built a small shelter and have crafted a bed for yourself, you have a safe place spend your nights. If you die after sleeping in your bed, you'll now spawn within that building, rather than at the initial spawn point. You can spend a few days building up your house if you like, but it's a big world out there and you need to get ready to take it on.

Setting Up Shop

You're going to die at some point, and when you do, all of your meticulously collected junk will fly all over the place. You can go retrieve it, but if you die on the way, everything you lost is gone forever. If it's in a dangerous place to begin with, reaching your lost goodies might prove difficult or even impossible. Therefore, it's a good idea to customize your home so that it serves as more than just a place to rest your head. You also can turn it into a place that can protect your precious booty and tend to your basic needs.

First, you want to put a Crafting Table down somewhere in your home, so you always have access to one if you respawn. You'll also want to build a Furnace for Smelting. You can make this with eight pieces of Cobblestone. Smelting allows you to refine metal from ore, cook Clay into Bricks, and turn Sand into Glass. To use your fancy new furnace, simply place a flammable fuel in the bottom slot (planks will work fine, Coal and Charcoal are more efficient, and a Bucket of Lava lasts the longest) and the material you wish to smelt in the top. If everything is kosher, you'll see the arrow begin to fill. As items are smelted, the furnace fuel is slowly consumed. The smelting will continue as long as the furnace has fuel and raw materials, so you can go ahead and close the furnace window to do other things.

Next, use planks in the same formation to make a Chest. This allows you to store items. When you begin mining, return here and put your non-essential items in the chest. This way if you die, you'll still have all those rare metals and stockpiles of building materials you worked so hard for. Two chests placed next to each other will form a larger chest with significantly improved capacity.

Make Torches

Torches aren't just a way to light up the night. If you're going to be mining or exploring caves, you'll need a source of light to show the way, and for that, you'll need to build some torches.

In order to build torches, you'll first need to gather Sticks and either coal or charcoal. The sticks you should have already taken care of.

The coal, however, may require some digging. Coal appears to be a stone block, only with black spots in the side. Sometimes, you can spot it amid the rock in the side of cliffs, but many times, this coal is difficult if nigh-impossible to actually reach. Odds are, you'll have to do some digging to find it. But fear not! Coal is one of the most abundant ore-blocks in the game and can be found almost anywhere under the earth's surface, within the first couple layers of blocks. That ensures that charcoal is a viable option.

To make charcoal we'll need to first build a furnace which requires just a bunch of cobblestone (as outlined above). Pick the furnace from the menu/slot cobblestone into eight of the crafting table spaces (leaving only the center space blank) to output a furnace.

With the furnace built, you can right-click/L-click the furnace and fuel a fire with any form of Wood placed in the bottom slot; raw wood, Wood Planks or even sticks will do. In the top slot of the furnace, place wood blocks- not wood planks and wait a few seconds for the wood to burn down into charcoal.

To finally build a torch, simply place either coal or charcoal on top of a stick in the crafting screen. With a torch equipped, L-button/right-click on most surfaces to plant the torch and enjoy the warm light.

Arm Yourself

Another key item that you'll soon need (unless you're playing on the peaceful setting) is a weapon. Make one even if you don't think you necessarily need it, since it will also allow you to kill your food more quickly. Mostly, though, you'll need it to protect yourself against hostile Mobs. Even during the day time, caves can fill up with fearsome monsters. It's wise to avoid mining existing caves at first, but you may find yourself in one unexpectedly, so it's good to be prepared.

You can fashion a Sword out of wood planks, stone, or any kind of metal, which will affect the durability of the item. To start off, you'll probably want to use cobblestone. In your crafting table, just place two pieces of material vertically above a stick.

Your First Excavation

Now it's time to get down to some mining! Although you'll find countless mines and caves generated by the Minecraft world, these are full of monsters and other hazards. For your first project, it's best to find some solid stone near your Bed or spawn point and bore a fresh hole.

You'll want to dig gradually downward in a manner that allows you to easily retrace your steps and return to the surface. Closer to sea level (and even a bit above), you'll find coal and Iron Ore, and harvesting these should be your first priority. Iron ore can be smelted in your furnace to create Iron Ingots, which you can use to fashion better armor, weapons, and tools.

Once you have some iron Ingots, make an iron Pickaxe. You don't have to use it the whole time, just keep it with you. When you get 50 layers below sea level (14 layers above the bedrock), you'll start to see rarer types of ore to mine. Redstone is fairly common in these layers, and it can only be mined with a pickaxe made of Iron or better. If you mine it with a stone or wood pickaxe it will simply disappear and you'll lose the precious redstone.

More rare among these lower layers are Gold and Diamond ore. Though gold is rare, it is soft and not really ideal for crafting equipment. However, gold can be used to make Clocks and Powered Rails. Diamonds make the best equipment, and a diamond pickaxe is the only way to mine the rare Obsidian needed to create a Nether Portal.

What Next?

If you've been following this wiki, you now have shelter, a mine, and a stockpile of raw materials. You can start to build a larger shelter, and more elaborate defenses like a moat, a protective wall, or a Fence. Life is good, right?

But there's a lot more to do, and an infinite world to explore. There are two more complete realms to reach. We don't have to deal with all that quite yet, though. How about tackling some more attainable goals first?